Breaking Even is an installation in three parts that together compose a balanced equation of alternate currencies resulting from five months of creative labor. Larger-than-life dominoes, home-canned foods, and porcelain coins represent the work, the energy expended to produce the work, and the funds invested in the work, respectively. Through these three currencies, I offer a means of comparison to invite consideration of what constitutes value and exchange in artwork and artistic production.

My art practice centers upon encouraging awareness through direct experience, making manifest latent energies and revaluing qualities such as slowness, mindfulness, patience, and connection that have become increasingly undervalued in contemporary culture. In this exhibition, I apply these practices to the concept of labor by offering a participatory inquiry into the nature of value and the mechanisms through which we receive and quantify the work and efforts of others. Through my current work, I seek to understand the value of experience by examining the relationship between an experience, the labor necessary to generate it, and what must be sacrificed to enable it. I also investigate the criteria for assigning value to different types of labor and question why some forms of work are deemed to be worth more than others. Finally, I continue my ongoing exploration of the relationship of vulnerability and impermanence to value. Do these qualities render the labor pointless? Or do they instead imbue it with greater value? Is the endeavor ultimately wasteful or meaningful?

Richard Serra once stated, “Work comes out of work.” This work is my work; it is both process and object, both labor and result. It is both my own solitary endeavor in the studio and the accumulated effort of numerous others whose time and energy is present in the gallery in less direct or apparent forms. Now it becomes yours, as well.